‘agitarse entre creencias contradictorias’/‘out of the quarrel with ourselves’: Republican Theory in the Writings of Antonio Machado and W. B. Yeats

Abstract

This essay presents a comparative analysis of writings by Antonio Machado (1875–1939) and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939). It contends that Athenian republicanism illuminates key aspects of both writers’ political thinking. The essay’s opening sections highlight the importance of language in Aristotle’s concept of man as a political animal. Machado’s and Yeats’ writings are then analysed under three headings: freedom, equality and fraternity. The essay concludes that the dialogical model of selfhood which finds expression in Machado’s and Yeats’ writings, parallels the republican concept of the polis as a community of interdependent citizens who search for the ‘good life’ together.

Key words:

• Antonio Machado
• early 20^th-century Spanish literature & political thinking
• W. B. Yeats
• early 20^th-century English literature & political thinking
• modernism
• republicanism
• interdependence
• Hannah Arendt
• Herbert McCabe
• Aristotle

Notes

1 James Whiston, Antonio Machado’s Writings and the Spanish Civil War (Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1996), 242.

2 Antonio Machado, XXXI, in Poesía y prosa, ed., con intro., de Oreste Macrì con la colaboración de Gaetano Chiappini, 4 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe/Fundación Antonio Machado, 1989), II, Poesías completas, 691 (further references to Machado’s work are included in the main text and indicated by volume and page number); W. B. Yeats, ‘The Man and the Echo’, in Collected Poems, ed., with an intro., by Augustine Martin (London: Vintage, 1992), 362 (further references are to this edition and are given within the main text). There has been surprisingly little comparative criticism on Machado’s and Yeats’ writings. For a useful recent exception to this, see D. Gareth Walters, ‘Antonio Machado’s ‘Late Style’, in Studies on Spain, Portugal and Latin America in Memory of William C. Atkinson, ed., with intros, by Ann L. Mackenzie & Ceri Byrne, BSS, XCV:2–3 (2018), 221–35.

3 For a detailed consideration of Machado’s republicanism in biographical and historical contexts, see Ian Gibson, Ligero de equipaje: la vida de Antonio Machado (Madrid: Aguilar, 2006); and Paul Aubert, ‘ “Gotas de sangre jacobina”: Antonio Machado Republicano’, in Antonio Machado hoy (1939–1989). Coloquio Internacional organizado por la Fundación Antonio Machado y la Casa de Velázquez, Madrid 11–13 de mayo de 1989, ed. Paul Aubert (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 1994), 309–62.

4 See Elizabeth Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism (London: Macmillan, 1981). More recent biographers, such as Roy Foster and Terence Brown, are in broad agreement with Cullingford’s analysis. See Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2001); R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2005), II, The Arch Poet.

5 W. B. Yeats, ‘Tomorrow’s Revolution’, in his On the Boiler (Dublin: The Cuala Press, 1939), 14–21 (p. 16).

6 Plato, Republic, trans., with an intro., by Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1993), 240.

7 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker, with an intro. & notes by R. F. Stalley (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1995), 1253a1–7.

8 Herbert McCabe, Law, Love and Language (London: Continuum, 2003 [1^st ed. London: Sheed & Ward, 1968]), 87.

9 Herbert McCabe, The Good Life: Ethics and the Pursuit of Happiness, ed., with an intro., by Brian Davies OP (London: Continuum, 2005), 72.

10 McCabe, The Good Life, ed. Davies, 28.

11 ‘The foundation of republican theory is the understanding of human interdependence’ (Iseult Honohan, Civic Republicanism [London: Routledge, 2002], 11).

12 W. B. Yeats, ‘The Literary Movement in Ireland’, in Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader, ed. David Pierce (Cork: Cork U. P., 2000), 38–44 (p. 40).

13 W. B. Yeats, Explorations (prose papers), selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (London/New York: Macmillan, 1962), 337 (further references are to this edition).

14 Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, I, The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914, 405.

15 W. B. Yeats, ‘An Irish National Theatre’ (1903), in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, general editors Richard J. Finneran & George Mills Harper, 14 vols (New York: Scribner, 1989–2015), VIII (2003), The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed., with an intro., by Mary FitzGerald & Richard J. Finneran, 32–35 (p. 34).

16 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Barker, 1317a40.

17 Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism, 4.

18 Cullingford, Yeats, Ireland, and Fascism, viii.

19 W. B. Yeats, ‘Compulsory Gaelic’ (1924), in Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats, ed. John P. Frayne & Colton Johnson, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1975), II, 448.

20 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2^nd ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998 [1^st ed. 1958]), 180; italics in the original.

21 Hannah Arendt, ‘Philosophy and Politics’, Social Research, 57:1 (1990), 73–104 (pp. 85 & 86).

22 Robert E. Goodin, ‘Folie Républicaine’, Annual Review of Political Science, 6 (2003) 55–76 (p. 64).

23 McCabe describes the true polis as ‘an argumentative regime’ (The Good Life, 48).

24 Arendt, The Human Condition, 171.

25 W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York/London: Macmillan, 1989 [1^st ed. 1961]), 314.

26 W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 331; William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c.1790).

27 W. B. Yeats, ‘Reveries over Childhood and Youth’ (1916), in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, general eds Finneran & Mills Harper, III (1999), Autobiographies, ed., with an intro., by William H. O’Donnell & Douglas N. Archibald, 37–108 (p. 101).

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.